In the old days courting the press had a lot of steps. First, mailing lists were personally developed or bought, hard copies of your releases were printed out, then inserted into envelopes, stamped, deliver to the post office.,

Mass faxing made things a bit more automated, but it still took hours of writing the cover sheet, plugging in numbers and repeatedly feeding the release.

For the most part the days of snail mail and mass faxing have been put to bed. Now the Internet makes it possible to quickly tailor your media list, whereas in the old days publicists actually went to the library to use Bacon’s Media Directory if they didn’t work at a larger firm that owned a copy.

E-mailing made it faster to deliver releases and easier for editors to respond. But go back just a few years and most media people wouldn’t open emails with attachments, fearing the threat of viruses.

These days the word virus conjures up viral marketing, not a virus on your PC.

Online tools have made it possible to reach thousands. Just electronically load up your press release and images onto one of the dozen or so reputable release and distribution service such as Vocus (PRWeb) or PRNewser.

When we used Vocus to distribute a release for our client boatinglocal.com, our client rose to the top of Google News, Yahoo News and Bing within hours as well as blogging sites and several national newspapers.

As the result of the PR and SEO we have positioned boatinglocal.com as the number one on Google.

And these days it’s all about the traffic, baby.

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